


Dry Bones

by aster_risk



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fictober Day 9, Grim as Fuck, Immortal Scully, Post-Colonization (X-Files), The End of the World, X-Files OctoberFicFest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 11:48:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12320493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: She's learned to live with Spender and vice versa, if only because they can't bear to live with themselves. After all, what can they do about it—die? Their bodies won't let them.





	Dry Bones

“I didn’t want this any more than you, Agent Scully.”

 

“Bullshit,” she spits, tearing into a leg of fire-roast chicken. “You sacrificed this whole fucking planet to have an intergalactic dinner party. S’not my fault your guests never showed. Not my fault you thought you’d be dead by now.”

 

“So did you. You thought you would be buried beside my son and yours.”

 

She snarls, “fuck you!” and hurls a wishbone at him. It bounces off his crinkled, seran-wrap skin. It still surprises her just how quickly all her manners and socializations went out the window when there was no one to keep them in check. No one but him.

 

Spender lights a cigarette. She doesn’t ask where he found it; probably in the deserted, skeleton-littered gas station they raided the other day—if it had even been day, that is. She can’t tell from the sky. 

 

He taunts her daily, more cruelly than he dreamed of doing in the days after they found each other in the wasteland. Alive. Unharmed. He’s ancient and bored; she’s battered and immune to it all. So they taunt each other, and sometimes they laugh. 

 

She remembers stumbling through the sea of blinding white skeletons, posing like props in a science teacher’s closet. They littered the streets, bleached and open-jawed and grimly theatrical. 

 

Spender carries a skull with him, a stranger’s he found in the woods. They named it Ioreck and had a laugh.

 

She remembers finding him in the burnt-out Hoover building, nearly unharmed. She remembers shooting him six times through the chest because there was no civilization left to stop her. 

 

They live off what they can hunt in the wasteland, wander where they please. At first Scully took satisfaction in the notion that Spender’s extra-terrestrial army never showed. They blew him off like a bitchy college friend you invite to catch up over brunch. Now she just wants them to end it already, fry the whole damn planet or beam her into their ship and put her into an alien zoo where time is an illusion.

 

She snorts and eats another chicken thigh. Too bad their bodies just won’t fucking die. Maybe next time she shoots a deer it’ll look the other way. (It never does.)

 

“You get the ammo?” she asks. Going into the gas stations is his job. They’ve been traveling what’s left of the country for years now, and she’s still scared she’ll stumble into one and see two grinning skeletons the likes of her husband and son. Wherever the fuck they were when the world went up in flames.

 

“Yes. Are you ready?” he asks in the same gravelly monotone. She nods and gets to her feet, taking the bullets from his too-steady hand and loading them into her gun. 

 

It’s a formality by now, this nightly ritual of theirs. She points her gun at him and stares down the barrel of his. They aim for the heart, and Scully wonders if the reason it never works is what heartless bastards they’ve both become. 

 

She pulls the trigger. Two gunshots rattle the clearing, and a cloud of crows erupts from the conifers around them. Scully looks down at her tattered button-up—a bloody hole sprouts from her right breast. It hurts less every time, and she knows by morning she’ll be healed. 

 

Spender drops to the ground and groans. His knees are fucked in his old age, but they won’t kill him. Perhaps it’s for the best he’s as immortal as she. He’s shitty company, but better him than Ioreck. Ioreck can’t argue back. Ioreck can’t make her feel anything, even if all she feels these days is long-abandoned grief and the worst kind of humor.

 

He pushes himself to his feet with a grandfatherly grunt. She hates him for it. She hates every inch of him but she’s learned to live with him. It still shocks her how quickly they learned to live with each other in the aftermath. It makes sense, though—they have to live with each other, since they can’t bear to live with themselves.

 

Sometimes she wants to put bullets in his head (she does it. It can’t kill the old fucker anyway). Sometimes, in the grotesque wit of long-time survivors, he makes her laugh. Sometimes, if she stares long enough, she notices—he has Mulder’s eyes.

 

 _In this decayed hole among the mountains_  
_In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing_  
_Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel_  
_There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home._  
_It has no windows, and the door swings,_  
_Dry bones can harm no one._  
_Only a cock stood on the rooftree_  
_Co co rico co co rico_  
_In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust_  
_Bringing rain_

_T.S. Eliot “The Waste Land”_

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the beautiful “100 Years” Immortal-Scully fic by thetwistedargent on Tumblr and a gloriously snide comment by sunflowerseedsandscience about how CGB Spender just won’t fucking die. 
> 
> I wanted to explore a more cynical, dark side of Scully that I believe is the side everyone would show if we were forced to weather a post-apocalyptic world. We all succumb to instinct and basic survival at some point. We sacrifice our morals and grudges for the sake of having any other human around. Scully is no exception.
> 
> With apologies to T.S. Eliot for referencing his poetry in the title and quoting it at the end. This was grim as fuck anyway, and I couldn’t resist.


End file.
